But with this one, with a fellow traveler, and a good one, as Q is, desolation was never a problem. It was a threat every single day of the trip, as I remember it now. The great enemy on the 'Blue Highways' trip, being on the road those three months, was desolation.

What's it like to go on a trip that's a mosey, as you call it, versus a quest, in 'Blue Highways,' that you felt you needed to take?Ī: It was certainly a more enjoyable trip to take - trips, I should say, since there were six of them in there. In 'Roads to Quoz,' you're not broke and you have your wife as a traveling companion.

Q: The journey you wrote about in 'Blue Highways' was prompted by the breakup of your marriage and the loss of your job. Heat-Moon spoke by phone from Seattle during a book tour. Thankfully, however, even though Heat-Moon often laments a dying rural America, his tone is invariably amiable, never cranky.

Sometimes it's a bit overindulgent, as when he veers off the road in sections he titles 'digression alerts' or gets overly cute when exploring the letter Q ('Forgive me, quick-witted reader, if this quodlibet to Q has made you querimonious'). Heat-Moon's prose is folksy and lighthearted. (As for 'quoz,' he defines the word as 'referring to anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar. In 'Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey' (Little, Brown 581 pages $27.99), his new book that chronicles his adventures, Heat-Moon travels with his wife, who goes by the name Q.

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